


way i tend to be

by Frostandcoal



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: M/M, Neil's POV, Post-Canon, learn how to use your words neil, neil learns how to be, new!team, nickname shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 15:45:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11924088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frostandcoal/pseuds/Frostandcoal
Summary: For erinaceinae-lutrinae on tumblr, who gave me the following prompt:"Someone on Neil’s pro-team decides his nickname should be junior, and Neil does not take it well.”





	way i tend to be

**Author's Note:**

> This is set post-canon, in the same 'verse as Clickbait (in that Neil plays for Detroit Dragons his first season, and Andrew is the new goalie for their rivals, the Chicago Cyclones) and set during Neil's first season. 
> 
> Thanks for the prompt! Making Neil deal with his past = ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS OMG :D 
> 
> (Also this may be a stretch as to why they call Neil "Junior" but go with me >>)
> 
> I'M ALSO SORRY THIS IS SO LONG i'm like incapable of writing anything under 1600 words i think :|
> 
> Also title from Frank Turner's "Way I Tend To Be" and literally every song of his can be on an AFTG soundtrack istg

__

Neil knows what it means that he’s the rookie. It means he has the locker that doesn’t quite shut right, his parking space is the farthest from the door and he’s the one who has to pick up the equipment after practice. He might be a collegiate champion and a former Exy captain, but in the pro’s, he’s the new kid.

Fine. That’s great, he doesn’t mind -- this is Exy without classes and exams, and while the stability of the last five years went a long way to make him feel like a real person, having a new team, a new city, is exhilarating in its own way because _this time he chose it, he’s here because someone wants him to be, not because he’s running away and trying to hide._

His new teammates are nice enough. Neil has a reputation for being small, mouthy and fast and he’s the shortest player on the Dragons _and_ the fastest, but so far he’s been fairly quiet as he’s getting his bearings. He’s not sure -- no, he _knows_ \-- this team will never be what the Foxes from his freshman year are to him, because they’re family and this...well, this is his team and that’s fine.

At least it’s fine until he gets a nickname.

It’s a stupid nickname, too, although really, aren’t they always? It’s after practice and his teammates are talking about some movie Neil doesn’t know, from that period of time where he was living in a succession of motels and other people’s cars. It means there’s nothing but a blank space where the requisite cultural knowledge should be, and unless the Foxes made him watch something or explained the references they were making, he was always too slow on the uptake to get them.

Unfortunately no one here knows enough about him and his history, and instead of explaining they just laugh when Neil looks around in obvious confusion.

“Oh,no,” Backliner Gin Belamy says, shaking her head. “Not another one. You guys remember Eli?”

There’s a chorus of good natured groans, and then Belamy explains, “Eli was my backliner partner when I first got here. He was from this like...really conservative family where they weren’t ever allowed to see movies. So he never knew what we were talking about, either.” She laughs, then says with a grin, “I guess we’ve got Eli, Junior, here.”

And that’s when Neil’s entire team starts calling him _junior_.

***

“Hey, Junior! Head’s up!”

“Hey, Junior, you want to go grab some drinks after the game?”

“Great job out there, Junior!”

“Don’t worry, Junior, we can’t win ‘em all.”

***

After his freshman year, Neil got used to people calling him _Wesninski_ in an attempt to get him off his game.

Their first post-championship match-up against the Ravens had been at Castle Evermore. The students had shown up wearing black t-shirts with “Butcher the Foxes” printed on the front (complete with an axe dripping blood) and “Wesninski” on the back.

That night, Neil set a school record -- for PSU _and_ Edgar Allan -- for most goals scored by a single player during a game, and didn’t give a shit about the t-shirt since everyone wearing them went home disappointed.

Other teams tried throwing his former surname around on the court as an intimidation tactic, but it never worked. They quickly figured out that pissing off the mouthy striker meant risking life and limb thanks to the Foxes’ vicious goalkeeper, and by the time Neil was a senior he’d given his opponents plenty of other reasons not to like him.

The Dragons know about Neil’s past - at least, he assumes they do, because they never ask him a single question about his life before his freshman year of college, in a way that seems deliberate. Still, no one puts it together because “Nathaniel” is not “Nathan” and so none of them have any reason to think Neil was ever called “Junior”.

Neil tells himself it’s fine, that he doesn’t tense every time his phone vibrates with a text message, that he doesn’t pause every goddamn time he opens his locker.

***

His teammates want to be friends with him, he knows this.

The Dragons were last place in a competitive division, and they are using a lot of space in their salary cap for Neil in an effort to become more offensive-minded. It puts a lot of pressure on Neil to score goals, and it also makes him feel like he’s this separate entity, a lone striker even though that’s not how the game is played and -- no matter how many goals he scores -- not how it’s won.

Between that and the _junior_ thing, he feels less like a member of the team and more like an actual dragon, living alone in a cave and breathing fire whenever anyone gets too close.

The team starts to think maybe he’s convinced he’s too good for them, and the _junior_ takes on a bit of a mocking lilt in a way that wakes Neil up at night in a cold sweat, wanting to run.

***

“What,” Andrew says, his voice low and dangerous, “Did she just call you?”

They’re playing against each other for the third time, Neil’s Dragons versus Andrew’s Cyclones, and Belamy just jogged by after Andrew made an impossible block on Neil’s shot and said, “You better get the next one, Junior.”

“It’s nothing. There’s been a little mis--” Neil stops himself just in time before he says the word.

Andrew’s eyes are icy behind his mask. The buzzer sounds before Neil can explain.

***

“Mother _fucking_ Minyard can eat a dick,” Belamy grouses, later, her ankle elevated post-game with an ice pack. “Fucking psycho, what the hell was his problem? If he’s going to aim at someone, it should be you, right, Junior? You guys have that rivalry and everything.”

Neil sighs.  

***

“Let me get this straight,” Andrew says, exhaling and looking at Neil as if Neil is exceptionally dull. “Your teammates are calling you Junior because you didn’t get a movie reference and you haven’t explained that it makes you murderous?”

“It’s just that,” Neil says, fiddling with the sleeve of his hoodie, “I don’t want to talk about it.” He knows better than to say _it’s fine,_ because Andrew can very clearly see that it’s not. Neil hasn’t been sleeping, his playing has started to suffer and that makes him nervous considering his fucking life depends on his career.

Andrew, with his usual brutal precision, gets to the heart of the matter in seconds. He grabs Neil’s chin and stares hard at him. “Either tell them to stop calling you that, or stop letting it bother you. Those are your two choices.”

Neil scowls, but instead of pulling away he presses his forehead to Andrew’s and says, “Fine,” as petulantly as humanly possible.  

Andrew kisses him like he always does, like it’s a fight he wants to win. “Good.”

***

“Here’s the thing,” Neil tells Belamy. “I -- my father, you know about that, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” she says, blinking at him.

“I was named after him,” Neil says. They are standing in the parking lot after practice, Neil shivering because spring in Detroit is not the same as spring in South Carolina. He shoves his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, and feels the edges of his keys against his palm. There are a lot of them now -- the court, his car, his apartment, Andrew’s apartment in Chicago -- but the two he unerringly finds with his fingers are the most familiar, Andrew’s Maserati and the house in Columbia.

The house has been sold and the locks changed, but Neil will keep that key until the day he dies.

“I was Nathaniel,” he continues, tracing the familiar edges of the key. “My father was Nathan. So I was….” he waits, hoping she’ll get it. He doesn’t want to have to tell her about the locker, the way all that blood smelled, how it sounded squishing beneath his shoes.  

“I’m missing something -- oh shit,” Belamy says, her eyes wide. She puts both hands on her face. “Oh, my God, Josten. Why didn’t you _say_ something? I feel like a bitch.” She then punches him in the shoulder, hard. “Which is your fucking fault, what is the matter with you?”

Neil feels his shoulders lower a bit and shrugs. “I’ve been told my learning curve is a horizontal line,” he offers up wryly, and she shakes her head.

She promises to tell the others, and Neil is relieved that this is finished and done with until she stops on her way to her car and says, “Is that why Minyard tried to break my ankle on that return? Because he heard me call you that?”

Neil stares at her and doesn’t know what to say.

Apparently that’s answer enough, because she just says, “Rivals, huh,” and gets in her car.

No one on Neil’s team calls him _Junior_ after that.

***

The Dragons decide to free up cap space and try another new identity that is maybe a little more balanced than “one good striker,” and end up trading Neil.

Neil ends up a Cyclone, with one less key on his keyring.

In his first game against the Dragons, his former-team-turned-rivals, he lines up across from Belamy and waits for the game to start.

“Well,” she says, eyes glinting. “Look who it is.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Neil, because he knows what’s coming and it doesn’t bother him. Something about owning up to the reason _why_ he didn’t like being called “junior” made it easier to handle, and there’s probably some kind of life lesson there if Neil were the type to ever process those for longer than five minutes.

So he’s waiting for her to throw it at him but instead she says, “Traitor,” and knocks him over the second the game starts.

Oh. Right. Sometimes people surprise you not with blood in your locker, but by being decent human beings. 

**Author's Note:**

> i should...probably give this 'verse a name? HMMM
> 
> also in my head, there's a raven on the cyclones who played at Edgar Allan the same time neil and andrew were at Palmetto State. and she swans into the locker room one day and hands over one of those "butcher the foxes" shirts to Neil and says, "here these are going for like, eighty bucks on eBay but i bet you could get 200 if you signed it" 
> 
> i believe in my soul they become friends.


End file.
